Figure 1. Changes in the bird populations of Epping Forest since 1800. The
proportional circles indicate the total number of species recorded in the
periods shown. White area represents breeding birds, dotted areas wintering
species that do not breed and black denotes vagrants.
1800-1850 1880-1900 1932-1942 1977
warned, "the study of woodland is in its very early stages and we cannot as yet
readily answer such questions as why this bird is in that wood'',
It is commonly suggested that the bird population of Epping Forest is poor,
and has declined from a previously higher level (e.g. Wallace, 1971). Such
assertions are not new and were being made, and refuted, in the last quarter of
the nineteenth century (McKenzie, 1883), whilst in the early part of the same
century Henry Doubleday had noted fluctuations in the populations of Forest
birds (Mays, 1978). It is difficult to verify the accuracy of these early statements,
however, for it seems that few of them were based on accurate observation and
those that were, as in the case of Doubleday, lack quantitative data. One must
remember that even the best of nineteenth century naturalists were operating at
a time when the science of ornithology was in its infancy.
Henry Doubleday (1808-1875) was a major influence on later as well as his
contemporary Epping Forest ornithologists. Chiefly remembered as an ento-
mologist, his bird observations were largely in the form of private correspond-
ence and were incorporated into the work of Yarrell (1843) and Christy (1890),
whilst his brother, Edward Doubleday, who shared Henry's interests, published
some notes on Epping Forest birds in what today seems an improbable source,
The Entomological Magazine (1836). Buxton (1898) and Glegg (1929) also drew
on the Doubledays' records, and as late as 1968 their influence may be detected
in Hudson and Pyman's Guide to the Birds of Essex.
This lack of quantitative information, however, is not confined to the
nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. Census work was developed by the
British Trust for Ornithology in the 1930's, but few surveys of this kind have
been made in Epping Forest: essentially they are confined to a handful of
studies made under the B.T.O's Common Birds Census and Register of
Ornithological Sites, plus some work undertaken by the author at the Epping
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